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Event - Untimely

Untimely

➥ Reality Check

Photo of a light-skinned person with dark hair lying in bed. They are wearing blue and white striped pajamas and a gray eye mask. The covers are white.
(cw: hypersomnia, coma, supernaturally induced metaphysical hunger, psychosomatic pain)

"We all dream," the representative from Copernicus explains, directing attention to a powerpoint slide projected onto the wall beside her. The seminar in one of the conference rooms is ADI's latest effort to combat Ava's influence and take the fight to their foe. If she's going to put them all to sleep, then so be it. Let their ranks be ready for battle there. "My boss, Zyrian Steel, is a big dreamer. Copernicus started as one. We-" She pauses as her eyes seem to catch on someone at the back of the room. "But that-that's another presentation! Suffice to say, Mr. Steel heard you were having some sleep troubles around the office and wanted to help.

"Hello, everyone. My name is Luna, and I'm here from Copernicus' Augmenting Reality group to talk to you about lucid dreaming. Now, I see some of us are here in our Halloween outfits." She smiles and poses in her 50's-style poodle skirt. "Some of you have very impressive make-up and prosthetics, I might add. I was told there might be some stiff competition for this mid-Halloween get-together. Glad to see they weren't having a little fun with me." Any non-human in the audience is given an appreciative nod. "I can see we have a few dreams brought to life here, but what about shaping the dreams we have while we're in them?"

"We're going to go through a few exercises today. The key tricks for inducing lucid dreaming include:

"One, assess your reality regularly. Even if you can't remember falling asleep, take a moment every few hours to test your reality. Dreams might look very familiar, but there will always be inconsistencies and distortions you can catch. This should help you to recognize when you're dreaming.

"Second, the MILD method or Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams. This is a method where you'll set an alarm for 5 hours after you go to sleep. Once awake, you'll tell yourself, 'The next time I'm dreaming, I will remember that I'm dreaming.' You'll also try to imagine yourself in a lucid dream as you go back to sleep. Silly as it sounds, just having that intentionality can be highly effective.

"Third, tell yourself when you go to sleep that you are going to have a lucid dream, that you will be shaping your reality, even if it seems outside of your control. Convince yourself. Convince others.

"And fourth…" Luna pulls out some high-tech looking eyemasks. "You can try one of our patented Lucidio Eye Masks. These devices help to unlock your mind and provide it with a few extra cues that you're dreaming once you enter REM sleep. We'll be handing out a limited number of samples, courtesy Mr. Steel. That's for the end of our presentation. Now, let's go through the stages of sleep…"

Whether you can stay away for the rest of the presentation, everyone will be chivved awake with increasingly harsh prods if they've fallen asleep during the presentation. There are more seminars throughout the next few days, always similar with Luna offering her guidance on lucid dreaming. Maybe it's enough. Maybe it isn't.

The music doesn't stop. As with last October, the haunting tunes extend their grasp from the graveyards and out toward the rest of Gloucester, ringing through ADI's halls, along with the Flophouse. The music induces intense sleepiness, and you might find your coworkers slumping down while they walk or you might fall victim to the music, yourself.

You awake… somewhere. It might be a place that's familiar, or one that's utterly alien. What you know is that there is something in this place that calls to you, sings in your blood and burns to be away from. And yet, you're terrified. There is something here that wants to consume every part of you, suck the marrow from your bones and leave you a husk of what you once were. You need it. You want it. You are hungry for it. For the fear it both brings and demands. This place seems to be some sort of pocket dimension, a personal hell built just for you and the things that sink their teeth into your bones and claw at the back of your mind. This is a terrifying place.

And you're not alone.

If you've been paying attention to the seminars, perhaps you'll be able to recognize this as a dream, something that isn't real. Sensations that aren't real. A world that isn't real. But with that realization comes a choice. You could try to break free of your personal hell, rip it to shreds, make it less horrific. Or… or there is something that calls to you in this place, a thing that sounds the death of who you once were, perhaps. You could call back, reshape this reality to terrorize the others trapped here with you. They'll never know if you were aware or not, will they? They don't need to know you did this to them consciously.

Just this once, what if you gave in? If someone dies in the dream, it's not like they die in real life. Right?

➥ Knead Help

Photo of several bread skulls on a red, glass platter.
(cw: blood, unsanitary food, supernaturally-induced existential dread, supernaturally-induced suicidal thoughts, isolation, dissociation)

Deathbed Bread is off the market. Thanks to a timely tip, the Health Department has finally made a slightly less timely visit to Better Loaf than Never, and were forced to shut the storefront down when their inspectors were unable to gain entry to the kitchen. The lights are still on behind the boarded-up windows, though, the smell of sourdough still permeating the air as loaf after loaf is delivered through a slot from the kitchen through the day and night, bread piling up on the counter and floor behind the register. They come at regular intervals, still warm from the oven. ADI has taken over the little storefront now and set up a tiny field office there, the higher-ups having pulled enough strings for law enforcement to look the other way and not ask too many questions about the people coming and going as efforts to break into the kitchen intensify...and as ADI staff truck away loads of Deathbed Bread to incinerate back at headquarters.

Someone has a bright (or maybe desperate) idea: if they can't get in, maybe they can at least stop the bread from coming out. Boarding up the bread slot, by all accounts, works for perhaps an hour or two as those present can still hear more bread piling up on the other side. Then there's a soul-wrenching cry of anguish followed by a violent attack on the barrier from inside the kitchen that ends with an ADI agent injured by flying debris and a cascade of sourdough loaves stained with bloody handprints. It's enough, though. Whatever supernatural seal that made the kitchen blockade impenetrable has broken, and within the day ADI is able to break down the door.

A thick, unnatural fog is all that can be seen inside the doorway. Rather than the cool of an early morning, though, the damp air is hot and cloying; those who venture inside will soon find themselves drenched with a mix of sweat and humidity from the air. They will also soon find themselves alone, regardless of what companions they might have had with them when they entered. Did you have someone with you? You must have; it would be foolish to enter alone, and yet it rapidly becomes difficult to remember their face, their voice, the touch of their hand. Perhaps you imagined them. Perhaps you've always been alone.

Dark shapes in the fog resolve into tombstones as one nears--no, into huge, upright loaves of bread jutting up from where they've been sunk into the soft ground of this strange graveyard, dry and cracked and dead. There are names pressed into them, dates of death spanning the last few weeks…and the next few. Perhaps you'll spot your own name and today's date. And why shouldn't it be today? Everyone dies, and everyone dies alone. Any action other than laying down on the soft dough of your own grave and letting it swallow you up is only delaying the inevitable.

The spell of deathly quiet over this place isn't complete, though. Keep moving, keep trying, keep hanging on to thoughts of those you love and the clear sky beyond this little world, and you might find a friend who needs your help as much as you need theirs. One or both people encountering each other may feel as though they're in a dream, unable to see or hear the other–but with persistence, with feeling, it's possible to reforge the connection. Love and friendship may shine a light on what was invisible–but so will shared anger, joy, or disgust. Any strong, shared emotion beyond the fear and sadness that permeates this place renders would-be ghosts visible, solid, and real to one another, able to move forward or turn back to escape together–or to begin tearing up the tombstones in fierce denial of their portents.

This hellish graveyard is as far as most will go. Somewhere deeper in what was the kitchen, Bryn still labors and the bread still piles up. It will be up to those few lucky (or unfortunate) enough to stumble across him to put a final end to this.

➥ Never Sleep Again

image of a country landscape with a two-lane road running through it, a bicyclist riding toward an impossible split in the road where the ground splits like a zipper and peels away toward the sky
(cw: child death, body horror, violence, potential injury or character death, nightmare dream logic)

Are you dreaming or are you awake? It becomes harder to tell as the music flows through halls and streets, rooms and parks. It’s dangerous out there, people falling asleep where they shouldn’t, or finding themselves face-to-face with what shouldn’t be when their eyes close unknowingly. Perhaps you planned it, your practice made perfect and your mind set to confrontation, maybe this time you sat down with the intention of stopping this. Or maybe it was simply an accident, but you’re here now. What else can you do but fight to survive?

The hellscape of your mind's torment might be familiar or maybe it’s a new flavor, but there’s something different this time. This time, there are seams; the dream around you is sewn together and you hold the scissors. Fight your way or will your way through, and you can pass between the swatches of your dreaming landscape. Maybe you find a friend or maybe you spot the retreating form of a little girl, turning a corner that isn’t there. Except you can see it now, the corridors of this place. You can follow her.

She leads you on a chase, her laugh a ricocheting titter of joy for the game. If you listen closely, however, there’s more to hear. The further you chase her, the more snatches of sound and sensation follow you as well. Grim melodies and snatches of song, searing heat, the taste of ash in your mouth, the sound of screaming that isn’t quite familiar. Your parents? Someone’s parents. Whispered voices. Snatches of words. ‘Amber.’ yelled, called, pleaded. Hide and seek was always fun.‘Ren’ a name that holds fondness, a feeling of a hundred tiny legs across skin- Stop! A command like a pick through your mind filled with anger and fear. Maybe it isn’t just your nightmares in here…

If you catch her, when you catch her, the game is over. Cornered and angry, Ava skitters up the wall, and across the ceiling to hang above you, neck at an impossible angle and clearly broken for it. “What’s wrong? Not having fun?”.

➥ Mod Notes

GENERAL - Bryn and Ava will both be available for NPC interaction and threading. Players who want to talk to ask Luna anything should respond to the Questions section of the OOC post. The mods will provide her answers to specific questions. Characters who die in the dreams will not die in real life, but they will experience severe fatigue and pain, and may retain scarring in the waking world from whatever killed them in the nightmares. Characters who die in real life… well, they're dead. Please bear this in mind as the game does not have an easy resurrection mechanic.
REALITY CHECK (16-25 October) - Everyone will be encouraged (but not technically required) to attend the lucid dreaming seminar. There will be a few of them over the course of three days. Characters can also pick up one of the Ludicio Eye Mask devices that will assist them in being able to enter a lucid state while dreaming. They don't always help, of course; they're mainly augmenting someone's abilities, provided they're following the guidance provided about how to enhance your lucid dreaming capabilities. Luna is clearly unaware that any non-humans are actually non-humans. She believes everyone is just really into Halloween around here.

The nightmares this go around seem to be specifically focused on the Entities that your characters fear most and/or the ones they might be drawn to. You are welcome to make up a personalized hellscape for your character with anything you'd like in it. These are dreams! Go wild! Characters will fall randomly in and out of each other's dreams and personalized hellscapes. Those who have mastered lucid dreaming will be able to traverse dreams with more purpose, aiming to go to specific people's dreams or get themselves out of ones they don't want to be in. Lucid dream experts will also be able to shape the dreams that are meant for them. In their own nightmares, characters will feel a definitive pull toward one (or more over different nights) Entity and experience an intense fear of that Entity along with the desire to feed it, even if you want away from it.

Feeding the Entities in the dreams and using the dreams to torment others will not necessarily lead to an Entity alignment… but it can do. Or it can set a character down a particularly destructive path in that vein. We would just ask that players remember that ADI is very anti-magic/Entities and anyone who is caught displaying powers/Entity alignment is liable to be mistrusted, watched, and potentially killed by the NPCs if they make themselves too much of an overt problem.
KNEAD HELP (18-25 October) - Characters may find bread gravestones with their own names, the names of people they have lost, and people they fear losing, as well as names of locals who have been confirmed dead due to eating Deathbed Bread. Some gravestones will bear the names and correct dates for people who are actually dead; others will refer to people who are still alive. Gravestone engravings may include characters back home in player characters' worlds, as well as player characters that have been dropped from the game. OOCly, the appearance of a person's bread gravestone is not a reliable indication of whether that person is actually dead or going to die. ICly, characters may or may not realize this fact at players' discretion.
NEVER SLEEP AGAIN (20-25 October) - As characters begin to gain control over their dreaming, they will find they can begin to track down Ava the Lullaby Girl. Confrontation can occur within the dream or, with enough willpower, a character can pull a piece of Ava into the waking world to try and kill her. Upon bringing her to the waking world, characters will find themselves faced with a teenaged version of the girl they were following, Ava’s actual body. She's not a little girl at all, but someone who's just entering into adulthood. Fights are likely to result in injuries ranging from mild to severe and can include death, please keep the setting’s death rules in mind for this. Threads with Ava can start in the dreams or already mid-fight in the waking world! It will take a concerted group effort to actually kill Ava. No one person will be able to do it themselves. Only a piece of her is pulled through or fought in the dreams that any person encounters.

The morning after the last pieces are killed, Ava’s mangled corpse will be found on ADI’s grounds shortly after dawn, clutching a bloody, stuffed lamb in one hand.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

reality check, the seminar
A lot of this sounds like a bunch of bunk. Lucid dreaming? That can't be a thing. There's no way that can be a thing. But Hickey attends the seminar anyway, loitering in the back of the room, listening, very much being that shitty kid who doesn't want to pay attention to the speaker. He is obviously not giving this his entire focus and needs to be poked and nudged and reminded to pay attention more often than not.

It's when they're finished that Hickey decides to bother someone. The nearest person to him gets a nod before he asks,

"You don't really believe this stuff, right? It sounds fake even for our line of work."

reality check, dream 1
possible cws for cannibalism, paranoia, body horror, gore
You're alone.

You're entirely alone.

The wide expanse of the Arctic lies in front of you, cold biting your lungs, rocks biting into your flesh. This place wants you dead—you can feel it. The hunger is biting, a creation of it's own, something that lives inside you and threatens to take you whole. This is a hunger that you've never experienced before and that you never hope to experience again. But there's also something here, creeping, pushing into you, you can feel it's breath on your neck and yet you are somehow entirely alone.

Or almost alone. Because Hickey's also there. In the middle of the expanse of nothing, like a beacon in the darkness, are some tents. There's a table set up with silverware and plates, good china, positioned in a way that it's almost a mockery of civilization. And there's a naked body lying face down on the middle of the table.

"You know what you'll have to do," Hickey points out. "It's easy. Easier than people realize. You just have to...ignore your morals for a moment."

Should have paid more attention in that lucid dreaming seminar, dipshit.

John was overconfident.

He’d even lucid-dreamed before, successfully, though he got his ass handed to him by the dream-entity that was his doppelgänger. And McKay had been there to help him get rid of it.

McKay’s not here, he’s alone, and he doesn’t have a team of scientists hooking him up to machines and stuff.

So he thought he could do this lucid dreaming thing well. He was wrong.

It’s cold. Desolate. He’s wearing his gray jacket and his tactical vest and it’s not enough in this environment. And now he’s staring at a tent, and a table, with some poor person there like they’re ready to be dinner.

The hunger he’s experiencing is staring to worry him.

“What?”

He stares at Hickey, in mild shock.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

He has an idea of what he’s talking about.

Edited 2022-10-17 23:10 (UTC)

Hickey has a knife in his hand. He idly points it towards John as he talks.

"You know exactly what I'm talking about. You can feel it too, can't you? That hunger, that thing that chews deep into you. What you'd do anything to satisfy."

He tilts the body upwards so that he can look at the corpse's face: it's him. The corpse on the table looks like an exact replica of Hickey himself. His expression shifts for a moment, eyes widening in surprise and hesitation before he pushes all that down to continue talking.

"We're in the Arctic. There's nothing here. And you'd give anything to just not be hungry. You'd do anything. So? Do it."

He can feel it. A desperate hunger, one that overrides all thought and reason, that consumes his entire mind, body, and soul. He’s been hungry before—he’s gone without food for long periods of time before—but it was nothing like this. He feels like he’s on the brink of starvation, with the solution right in front of him.

“I don’t know, I thought I saw a delicious-looking patch of moss back there.” His tone is dry. Sarcastic. Easier to do this than scream maybe.

He wonders if this is how Todd feels around him all the time. True, it wasn’t like he actually ate people with a knife and a fork, but sucking their life force away was pretty close.

“You know this guy?”

The hunger presses at his mind and before he knows it, he’s picking up a knife. His hand shakes a little as he holds it.

It’s unthinkable. But Hickey’s right. He will do anything to survive.

Even this.

“What-what about a rescue?” Maybe there’s someone coming. Maybe he can hold out.

Hickey laughs at that, shaking his head. "Mate, we're expendable. They don't send the people they care about on a mission like this. They're fine letting us die. But I'm not going to give them the satisfaction!"

That last part is yelled, screamed out as if the world can hear him. He never wanted to be back here again. He never wanted to go through this. But Cornelius Hickey isn't the sort of man to give up easily.

He looks down at the corpse, which looks even more like Hickey himself in the light. Hickey pauses, takes a deep breath, then traces his knife along the body's arm, slicing off a strip of flesh. Despite the fact that the corpse is...well, a corpse, that it must have been dead for a while, blood spurts from the wound as if the corpse had freshly died.

Well. He can't exactly argue against that. It's not like he's the military commander of a scientific expedition here. Here, he's just some guy. But it also looks like Hickey may have Issues about that more than he does.

"That's why you gotta make sure everyone knows your name. That's what separates you from the Red Shirts." He's used to his Trek references not landing so he doesn't bother to explain. "Like me, I'm Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard. Now you know my name, I'm less expendable."

He glances down at where Hickey slices off a piece of...they guy that looks like him, and it shouldn't be that bloody. He's still holding the knife in one hand. His hunger is so bad right now it's taking everything he's got not to jab the knife in the meatiest part of this unlucky guy's side. His hand moves almost involuntarily on its own, but he still hovers the knife tip just above the body.

"That's weird. Shouldn't this dude be like, I dunno. A little less fresh?"

Hickey looks over at John. Now you know my name, I'm less expendable, the fucking idiot. Does he really think that? Knowing someone's name is just being able to put a name to the face you see, knowing who's body you're looking at.

He keeps that to himself, though. And he definitely doesn't tell John his name. Instead, he takes the piece of flesh he's sliced off and puts it in his mouth. He closes his mouth and chews, tasting something that he never thought he'd taste again. But he doesn't want to give that hunger the satisfaction of knowing his fear, of knowing his thoughts, of knowing that being back where he started horrifies him more than he wants to admit.

"Tastes fresh," he points out. "See for yourself."

And he starts to slice off another strip of flesh before offering it to John, staring him down as if daring him to eat.

He doesn't tell him his name, John notes, which is telling in and of itself. Of course, this thought is completely shelved when mystery guy starts, well. Eating.

Somehow it's worse, seeing someone do it in front of you. Or maybe it's worse cause the corpse looks enough like him to be a twin.

"Oh, that's really, really messed up," John stares, no words for the depths of uncomfortable that shows on his face right now.

It would probably feel even worse if he wasn't literally starving, if that piece of meat offered to him didn't look like a piece of steak if you kinda tilt your head a little.

He takes it, but doesn't eat it. Not just yet.

"Shoudn't you, I dunno, serve this up with some barbecue sauce or fava beans, Mr. Lecter?," John says, the horror of it all building up in the back of his mind. He's trying desperately to convince himself he's not that hungry but it feels like pressure building up behind his eyes.

Cornelius Hickey | The Terror | open!

Reality Check Dream 1

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big ol cw: cannibalism

continuous even more cw: cannibalism

seminar

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Seminar

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